Modern military and industrial equipment typically comprise a multitude of systems, subsystems and circuits. In order for this equipment to be maintained, there must be a facility that allows those individual systems, subsystems and circuits to be tested, whether for preventative maintenance or to diagnose faults.
Military and industrial equipment must often be used in locations that are distant from or inaccessible to these facilities, such as clean shop environments. For instance, when mechanical equipment breaks down, the equipment may be disabled in a remote location. If the proper test equipment were available, a number of faults, including faults in the control electronics and other systems, could be diagnosed and repaired at the remote location, thereby minimizing down time and eliminating the need to transport the equipment to a repair facility.
Test equipment for field use must be able to operate in an environment of temperature extremes, electromagnetic radiation, and electronic countermeasures, as well as dirty, dusty, wet and/or humid environments. Conventional test equipment suffers from limitations that prevent or otherwise limit its effective use in extreme conditions and environments.
Conventional test equipment is also limited in that users often need to learn to use a large number of individual test devices, each of which may require different training in order to effectively operate and employ the test equipment. One reason for the absence of uniformity in operator interfaces among test equipment is that each piece of test equipment often provides an interface suitable only for a particular piece of machinery to be tested and possibly to a particular system or subsystem being tested. Thus, there is a need for a test bed that provides a common user interface. There is also a need for a system that allows the test bed to interface with a variety of different systems and equipment.
In a case where test equipment may be needed to test a variety of related equipment, such as often occurs in military applications, it would be desirable to allow the same test bed to be rapidly reconfigured for use with both different equipment interfaces and a number of different testing methods, without the need for different or additional pieces of equipment. Moreover, when a piece of test equipment itself requires repair or updating, it would be advantageous if defective parts could be easily replaced and outdated components updated without the need to replace the entire test equipment.
As noted above, conventional test equipment suffers from a number of limitations that limits effective use of the equipment in severe environments. For example, the sensitive electronics and components of a test system, such as those operated as part of a commonly available laptop computer, are at risk of exposure to the environment, including temperature extremes, dirt and water. In order to hermetically seal the sensitive electronics from the environment, the electronics could be sealed within a box. Modern electronic circuits produce substantial heat and the necessity to cool the electronics, including microprocessors, lead essentially all laptop type computers to utilize direct air exchange between the environment and the electronics, oftentimes through use of a forced air fan. When air-exchanging laptops are used in severe environments, the forced air introduces into the case detrimental contaminants including humidity, dirt, and possibly also radiological and biological contaminants. In such a case, even if the test equipment did not fail due to contamination, removal of detrimental contaminants would be difficult, if not impossible. Thus, test equipment that is exposed to the environment may be rendered unavailable at crucial moments, when most needed.
In view of the above, there exists an unmet need for an apparatus and system that provides a modular test equipment bed which is both adaptable for use in the field, especially in severe environments, and which is highly modular so that the test equipment bed can be utilized for testing a diverse array of equipment.